What walking around the world taught Karl Bushby: 'A constant display of the very best of humanity'

The phrase ‘adventure of a lifetime’ wasn’t invented for Karl Bushby, but it could have been. The ex-paratrooper left his home in Hull in 1998 and, 28 years later, still hasn’t returned. 

Bushby is walking the longest continuous pedestrian journey in history, from Chile back to Hull. He’s crossed South America, walked the length of the USA and Canada, then across Alaska and Russia in sub-zero conditions. From there, he became the first person to swim the Caspian Sea and is now on the home straight in Europe. He’s due back later this year.  

After decades trekking through jungles, ice fields, mountains and warzones, how does it feel to be within touching distance of the end? 

“It’s the end of my purpose for life, so that’s a little spicy,” he says. 

“But this is the day that it’s been all about since day one. We’ve got to get this thing done, and I’m not getting any younger.”

Bushby has taken a regimental approach to his 50,000-kilometre trip, which he thought up while in the army and bored by not being deployed anywhere. He refuses to take any form of transport (even ferries) while he’s on mission and won’t return to the UK until he’s there on foot, which means swimming the English Channel. Although that’s definitely easier said than done, not least because it’s illegal to start the swim in France, and Bushby’s requests to walk through the Channel Tunnel instead have so far been refused.

The scale of the task has always been eyewatering, but for Bushby that’s the point. 

“I drew a line on a map all the way from the UK to Europe, across Asia and into the Americas. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to stop in New York and took it all the way down to the bottom of South America. That’s when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you realise that this is what you’ve been looking for. From that point on, there was no going back.”

A dyslexic kid who struggled at school and took five attempts to pass his army basic training, before his walk Bushby always felt he had something to prove. Has he shaken that feeling yet? 

“Yes. There’s no disputing that we’ve overcome just about everything and it’s all worked out. 

“There have been so many miracles along the road to make this thing happen.”

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Miracle is the word. Bushby has been threatened at gunpoint in Columbia, arrested in Panama, detained in Russia, buried alive by snow in Alaska and even had a near-miss with a polar bear. Many don’t return from the Darién Gap – the jungle warzone which connects North and South America – or the frozen Bering Strait which bridges Alaska and Russia. Bushby has more lives than a lucky cat, but says mundane things like sunstroke and walking on busy roads are just as dangerous as the more adventurous parts of his journey.

“The fact I’ve never been hit by a car on these roads defies physics. There were weeks and months on the roads where I’d have a near miss every day. It’s terrifying.”

There’s also politics. Bushby was due to return by 2010, but visa, geopolitical and sponsorship issues have held him up: almost half of his time away has been spent resolving these problems instead of walking. 

“We’re not willing to compromise on the route. We can’t just jump on a plane and go to the next place, we’ve got to work on it. That can take years.

“During the pandemic everything was closed…Then Russia moving into Ukraine was a major obstacle and I ended up having to swim the Caspian [Sea], which took an extra year to work out the logistics and the funding and support for.” 

The financial crisis also grounded Bushby for years, as he couldn’t get the sponsorship he needed to continue his journey. 

Then Russia refused to grant him a visa, which he did not take lying down. 

“I decided to walk 5,000 kilometres in the wrong direction in a protest march [from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington DC] while trying to put some kind of media campaign together, with very little hope that that would ever work. But it did.”

You’d think constantly dealing with such problems would crush your faith in the world, but Bushby’s walk has done the opposite. 

“I’m not totally naive. I know humanity can be an absolute pain in the arse, especially when we’re in groups, but as individuals we’re the best of the best. Right from day one it’s been a constant display of the very best of humanity. The world is a lot better than it looks when you’re watching the 24-hour news cycle, that’s for sure.

“I wouldn’t be where I am if things didn’t come together. The world did that.”

A citizen of the globe, the adventurer has ingrained himself in more cultures than almost anyone. Despite political divisions, Bushby says humans aren’t so different at all. 

“The cultural thing is wafer thin, and below that everything is the same. The same things make us laugh, the same things make us cry. We have the same wants, the same needs. All humans can be identified by these very simple traits, and all you have to do is sit down and talk to them for a little while.”

Bushby has seen the best of humanity, often at the worst of times, including finding common ground with his
own kidnappers. 

Walking through a village in Colombia, he noticed a pair of right-wing paramilitaries eyeing him suspiciously, so hid in a cafe. 

“These guys showed up, people in the cafe left, they pulled the shutters down and trapped me in there with them. They showed me they had guns. This was a gangster-style interrogation because they wanted to figure out who I was.

“I had these newspaper clippings from all across South America explaining what I was doing. We had them waterproofed and I carried them with me specifically for these types of situations. They read through it and got pretty excited and very interested in what I was doing, then they became very friendly.” 

The pair ended up buying Bushby a new coat. However terrifying, it’s human interactions like this which have made his walk so fulfilling. 

“The three mile an hour perspective of the world is really the way to go. You’ve got to get burned by its sun, stung by its insects, pricked by its thorns, chew on its dirt. You’ve got to really get into it and live in it to start to develop some understanding.”

But Bushby is nearly home for the first time in decades. He seems more daunted than excited though. Reaching the finish line is the grand finale of the ultimate adventure, but it’s also the beginning of the normal life he’s spent decades dodging. Bushby famously says he’s never considered giving up on his walk, even at his lowest points. 

“I definitely don’t identify with home in the same way [as most people]. When [the challenge] is your life, what are you quitting? What am I quitting to? I don’t have anything else I could go back to. It looks very different from my perspective.

“The UK is a mystery to me right now, it’s a completely different place from where I was. It’s going to be another country that I’m going to have to learn when I get back, which is going to be interesting its own right.”

Of course, this journey hasn’t been without sacrifice. Bushby has seen his family three times in three decades and has fallen in love twice on the road. Both times he was forced to break the relationship off. He also left behind a five-year-old son, Adam – now an adult who has only met his father a few times.  

“I’ve lost those relationships. There’s a lot of distance between me and the family, so we’re going to have to get over that and relearn each other. That makes life difficult – you’re not supposed to live as isolated as I have without that family unit, without anyone you can call close friends, because your world is just a collage of changing faces and places. You just adjust, but it gets hard at times, fighting some of those basic instincts. 

“We all understood this beforehand though, and I wrote about it in my diaries. On page one I said I’m going to end up falling in love and I’m going to get burned, and it’s going to be very difficult. By god, that was right.

“We were very mission orientated, and once that became life there was just no way out.”

Attention on Bushby is already growing as he nears the finish line. After decades of anonymously pressing on, has he thought about how he wants people to remember him once his challenge is over?

“I have no idea. When I get home, there will be 15 minutes of fame, and then it’s done and it’s gone. It just doesn’t matter.” 

For Bushby, this has always been a personal challenge – a way of banishing doubt and proving his worth. He’s even thought about what he’s going to say as he crosses the finish line in Hull: 

“Told you I could do it. Now, what’s for tea?”

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